Affinity Publisher using up to much hard drive space (PC running slow)

[star_23]

Hi,

I recently started using Affinity Publisher 2 and after a few uses I noticed that my hard drive space is full. I started out with over 140gb of free space now I only have 14gb. I've done a little research and found out it could have something to do with a file called "personabackstore.dat", but I could not find a way to remove it on Windows 10. I've tried closing/reopening and uninstalling the app, but nothing works. Does anyone have a fix for this issue? Thanks!

[thomaso]

Hi @star_23,
welcome to the Affinity forums!

There are various reports about issues with large files named "personabackstore.dat" since years. Unfortunately it appears unclear when this file gets used and when in such a massive file size, as the Serif moderator Pauls informs in this post of 2019: "The use of it can depend on memory availability and also file availability. Not easy to predict when it is in use".

It appears one reason could be a possibly customized RAM setting in the app Preferences > Performance > RAM usage limit, as this post + the answer of the OP indicates.

In other threads the way of resource placement policy is mentioned to be related, so it might be worth a try to switch your placed resources from "linked" to "embedded" or vice versa in the Resource Manager. After that a "Save as…" with a new file name is recommended, which, by the way, always may help to get rid of temporary but redundant data saved with a document.

7 hours ago, star_23 said:

I've tried closing/reopening and uninstalling the app, but nothing works.

This sounds odd, in the reported threads the file appears to get reduced when the document or the app gets closed. What if you close the document, then close the app + open again without opening the document, then close the app again? Does this influence the size of this file? (Some temp files get deleted by Affinity not when closing but when launching the app, in case certain temp files would be needed again, for instance if a document is set to reopen automatically).

Hopefully a Windows user will come forward with information on how to delete this file.

[NotMyFault]

The file is simply a surrogate for RAM. Affinity tries to mimic OS page file logic internally. If you have a document which requires more RAM than available in OS (virtual RAM, not physical), Affinity will use this file on disk as alternative. The App will become totally slow, and the PC will too as the disk IO will become saturated. 
 

Affinity Apps can use only 32 (or 64) GB RAM, even in case more RAM is installed.

The only way to avoid is to keep the working document as small as possible:

• don’t use excessive DPI or document size
• convert large linked/embedded documents into smaller (e.g. by cropping, resizing, color format conversion etc)
• use file formats supporting lossless / lossy compression (e.g. avoid BMP)
• inspect file size in Ressource manage and finder/explorer
• split large documents into smaller parts

[NotMyFault]

52 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Hopefully a Windows user will come forward with information on how to delete this file.

It is stored in a hidden folder.

just delete it after all Affinity apps are closed.

Autosave files are another source for wasted disk space. Delete the files frequently.

[v_kyr]

One can monitor and audit such files (like "personabackstore.dat" or autosave files) and if those exceed some predefined size let them auto-remove. - Should be easy to do even under Windows with some on-board Powershell script.

[star_23]

Thanks for the quick responses, I was able to fix the issue by doing a ChkDsk repair. Hopefully it doesn't happen again.